The study of personality has typically focused on self-reported answers to carefully crafted questionnaires. Various models of personality have been proposed by psychologists. For example, one model that has been successful in explaining variability across individuals is based on five orthogonal dimensions (also referred to as traits), commonly termed the “Big Five”: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. These dimensions have been shown to efficiently explain a substantial amount of variability in human preferences and behavioral dispositions across different domains of life and activities. They have been shown to be genetically heritable, stable over time and consistent across genders, cultures, and races. It is noted that personality traits differ from demographic information such as age, gender, mean income, race, and education.
Obtaining personality trait scores of individuals is typically a time consuming, complex and expensive process. In order to obtain accurate results personality questionnaires are lengthy and time consuming to complete. In addition, consent needs to be sought from individuals before assessing their personality and to make use of their individual data. The accuracy of any personality results may also be questionable as it is easy for individuals to deliberately bias their answers or to make random responses.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known personality aggregation systems.